Editorial voices from elsewhere
Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States:
Discretion within reason is acceptable in law enforcement. But while few complain when leniency is afforded ordinary people accused of minor crimes, there will be many critics of the FBI’s decision Tuesday not to recommend prosecution of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for carelessly handling top-secret emails when she was secretary of state.
James B. Comey, the FBI director, said Clinton was not recommended for prosecution because a yearlong investigation, including a review of more than 30,000 emails stored on several servers, had provided no clear evidence that Clinton “or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information.” Comey said Clinton had been “extremely careless” and, were she simply a government employee, would likely deserve some disciplinary action.
The scandal rose from a Republican investigation of the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. The recently completed Benghazi probe didn’t lead to charges against Clinton either. Donald Trump is unlikely to remove Benghazi or emails from his lexicon of Hillary topics, which is fine. A candidate’s history, including Trump’s, is fair game in a campaign. But voters should spend as much time considering each candidate’s plans for America’s future.
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken aim at the usurious payday lending industry. That is a good thing, and the bureau has adopted the right approach in seeking to ensure that lenders consider the ability of a borrower to repay before extending loans.
That seems logical, not to mention responsible. It departs from the business model of payday lenders. The industry preys on the financially vulnerable and desperate in making short-term loans at astronomical interest rates, approaching, and even exceeding, an annual percentage rate of 400. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau must take an indirect route to discouraging the practice. Beyond applying an ability-to-pay factor, it proposes stronger protection for the bank accounts of borrowers and a cooling-off period of 30 days after a borrower receives three consecutive payday loans.
Without precise regulation, payday lenders will find their way back to business as usual. Modern usury will remain, keeping dim the prospects for traditional banking ever developing an alternative to the abusive payday loan.
The time has come. The Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs must stop dragging their feet. They must own up to the serious chemical and radioactive hazards that U.S. service members were exposed to in the line of duty.
Thousands of veterans from the 1991 Persian Gulf War suffered debilitating health effects believed to result from chemical exposure in Kuwait and southern Iraq, and from reactions to untested vaccines administered to protect them from potential exposure to biological agents. The VA denied for years that Gulf War duty was the culprit.
The New York Times reported on June 20 that the Air Force doesn’t want to acknowledge responsibility for radiation exposure from cleanup of a 1966 crash in Spain of a B-52 bomber loaded with four nuclear bombs. The nuclear parts of the bombs didn’t explode, but radioactive fallout spread across the crash site.
The long succession of stories about veterans sickened during military service, who are repeatedly denied VA health care, strongly suggests the government views them as disposable assets. It’s as if officials prefer that the veterans would just die so their problems will go away.
Meanwhile, veterans and their families are left to grapple with medical debts often in the tens of thousands of dollars.
The VA’s and Pentagon’s constant obfuscation, evasion and runarounds are no way to treat those who selflessly answered their nation’s call to duty. Americans owe it to our veterans to speak out.